Fantasizing maternal infanticide: Negotiation of cultural hybridity and motherhood in Chinese American literature

This article examines maternal infanticide in Edith Eaton’s “The Wisdom of the New” (1912) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), reading it as a metaphor to explore intersections of gender, race, and diasporic identity in Chinese American literature. Both texts depict the infanticidal mother as a figure of constrained agency, whose actions are shaped by patriarchal violence, cultural dislocation, and intense pressure to assimilate. Eaton’s third-person narration and Tan’s polyphonic first-person structure each portray infanticide as a response to the breakdown of familial bonds and fractured cultural allegiance. The article argues that infanticide functions both metaphorically, as an expression of cultural rupture, and structurally, as a critique of social regimes that control women’s bodies and kinship. By comparing these works, it highlights the unresolved ruptures within Chinese American identity across generations, reimagining motherhood as a contested site of cultural memory, and resistance, where gendered and racialized forces collide.